Mandriva Linux 2010 spring “Farman” Review

Recently, the 2010 edition of Mandriva rolled out the presses and became available to download. For those who know nothing at all about Mandriva or it’s history, I must explain why to me this is a big deal. Before using Mandriva for the first time about seven months ago, I profess: I had an extreme hatred towards Linux systems using Red Hat. Not because of Red Hat itself, which I have never tried. But because of the fact that I could not find an RPM based distro that could sit down and act like Debian in providing a wide selection of choices.

I must admit, the first boot off the CD of Mandriva was slow, even though I was using the GNOME desktop environment, though this is understandable when you think about how much it can hold. Once it starts to install, it goes at about the standard speed for Ubuntu, a bit on the slow side compared to some distros, but compared to others, still pretty fast. The major thing I found cool and good to see, although it took more time, was the fact that it checked to see what packages it didn’t need and offered to remove them. If selected to remove the packages, it seems to make the computer boot faster as there is less that it has to load up on boot.